


Apricot Wine

by i_claudia



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-01
Updated: 2008-04-01
Packaged: 2017-11-18 11:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/560670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_claudia/pseuds/i_claudia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the end of the war, Dean thinks he’s free to live his own life and forget about the darkness of the past. Luna shows up to remind him of a promise he made, and in keeping it, his world shifts irrevocably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apricot Wine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2008 luna_exchange and originally posted [here](http://luna-exchange.livejournal.com/6243.html). (01 April 2008)

He hadn’t thought much about it when he’d first mentioned it. The thought had wandered across his mind and he’d said it; it had been something to talk about, something that kept the darkness and the fear away as they sat in the cellar listening for footsteps with a lingering sort of dread that never seemed to go away or fade. _After the war_ , he’d said, and what thought was comforting if not that? There was a certain kind of warmth in believing that Harry would come out triumphant once again, that they would all live normal lives and die of old age, and he was a firm believer in taking what warmth he could get. She’d held his hand, and he’d imagined that she was smiling at him.

And when it was all over, she’d kissed him on the cheek in the fury of everyone celebrating and mourning, crying and laughing in the same breath. The air had been full of promise and the sheer exuberance of realizing that they were still alive and the war was over, and then he hadn’t seen her for three years.

He let his friends set him up on a few dates, but inevitably his eye would be caught by the flickering candlelight or he’d catch the lingering scent of flowers in the air, and memories would come flooding back; memories of hands clutched tightly in fear and darkness, of straw-colored hair gleaming in the sunlight, of grey eyes reflecting the sea. He found out eventually that gossip had him marked down as a terrible date – something that was perfectly fine with him, but Seamus gleefully used every opportunity to take the mickey out of him for it, which did get old after a while.

The day he saw her again had started as a perfectly normal day; he’d made eggs and toast for breakfast, yelled at Seamus that if he didn’t get up he’d be late for work _again_ , and gone to find a quiet niche in a café to sketch. At noon, he’d headed to his tiny studio-gallery – “that miserable closet”, Seamus called it – and found her waiting for him, sitting in the sun and smiling at the pigeons, who glared balefully back.

Dean wondered, sometimes, about the universe and its apparent fondness for playing games with him.

“Hey, Luna,” he said, coming to a halt in front of her.

She turned that familiar, radiant smile on him, and he tightened his grip on his sketchpad, feeling his palms go sweaty. “Hello, Dean.”

_Three years_ , he thought, _was definitely not long enough_.

He’d never really known quite how to react to her (he doubted anyone really did), but she _had_ come to see him, presumably, so he invited her inside. She followed him in, looking around with interest at the work he’d put up on the walls. Quickly, he cleared off the brightly painted chairs he’d built, collecting the papers and sketches scattered everywhere and piling them on a side table he’d borrowed from his mother. She perched on a chair and watched him with a familiar look that both warmed him and made him shift in his own seat, vaguely unsettled.

“So,” he said, trying to sound cheerful and warm. “You’re back.” He paused, but this seemed somewhat inadequate as a welcome statement, so he tried again.

“I heard you were off somewhere tracking Crumple-Horned Snorkacks.” He’d heard it from Ginny, who had heard it from Neville, and hadn’t _that_ sent a hot, unpleasant shiver of jealousy down his spine?

“I was,” she replied simply. “But I’ve come back so you can paint me.”

He blinked. “Paint you?”

She gave him an odd look, and all of a sudden, he remembered words spoken in shadows and the terror of not knowing who might die next. _After the war, I want to paint you_ , he’d said, his voice fierce, his hand clutching hers tightly. _Then the world can’t ever forget us_. 

“Oh,” he said, blinking stupidly and wondering if it could really be this easy, if they could ignore three years just like that. Then he thought, _why the hell not?_ , and grinned. “Yes,” he told her. “I’d like that.”

She’d smiled again and he’d gotten out his canvasses and brushes and paints and his days had formed another, brighter pattern. He still went out in the mornings to sketch, but in the afternoons, he headed to his studio with his heart thumping half in hope and half in fear. Luna was always sitting on the step, waiting for him with a smile, her golden hair shining.

He started a series of portraits using her as the model, telling himself it was because he wanted to make sure his work did Luna justice. One painting alone could never capture her; he wasn’t sure if even a hundred could.

Dean had never been a man of many words – he had Seamus for that – but Luna seemed to have a gift for pulling his thoughts and dreams from him effortlessly. They talked about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks and Quidditch and sketches Dean had done of little old ladies gossiping over cups of tea and _The Quibbler_ ’s latest exposés of Ministry conspiracies. Sometimes, Dean never actually worked on his paintings; they chased the hostile pigeons or walked for miles without a map down streets Dean had never even heard of before. Often, Luna took the opportunity to quiz Dean on Muggle things.

“Hoovers,” she said one day as Dean concentrated on making her jaw line _just so_.

“What about them?” he asked absently, frowning at the canvas.

“They’re so odd,” she said, twisting to look at him. At his raised eyebrow, she turned back, but continued to talk. “I understand Muggles can’t exactly use magic to clean up, but one would think a broom would be just as serviceable to sweep the floor. And I don’t see how making a lot of noise helps make things cleaner.”

Dean chuckled. “People are lazy, that’s all. Why spend five minutes sweeping a room when you can hoover it clean in two? And they’re handy for doing the carpets,” he added as an afterthought. 

Luna tutted in disbelief. “I still don’t see why they’re so popular. All they do is use suction to pick things up. How do Muggles keep them from sticking to the floor? And how do they stop everything from just falling out again?” She paused, considering. “Although,” she continued thoughtfully, “they probably do scare away Blibbering Humdingers.”

Dean couldn’t help but laugh, and Luna smiled back at him, the corners of her big eyes crinkling with amusement. He laughed a lot when Luna was around.

As he got closer and closer to the end of the portraits he’d planned to create for the series, Dean noticed that he had slowed the pace of his work considerably. He told himself it was just because he was taking care to get the details right, or because he spent more time _talking_ to Luna than actually _painting_ her. A niggling voice in the back of his mind disagreed, but he deliberately shoved it aside and went on with painting.

On the day he was fairly certain that no matter how slowly he worked, he was going to finish the last painting, Luna showed up late. He had grown so accustomed to seeing her sitting on the steps, waiting, that when he turned the last corner and saw his studio with no one out front he stopped dead. Shaking himself, he walked forward, trying to scan the passersby as unobtrusively as possible. It was raining, and beneath the umbrellas and mackintoshes everyone looked the same: slightly bent and huddled into themselves, staring with great concentration at the ground as they hurried along. He had a sudden vision of Luna lying in a puddle somewhere, her yellow hair plastered wetly to the pavement while these bundled strangers passed her hastily by, and he gripped the door handle fiercely for a moment, trying to force the image from his mind.

He had lost track of how many times he’d paced from the small window to the door before Luna showed up, looking pale and shaken and utterly bedraggled from the rain. When he threw open the door for her and saw the look on her face, his relief turned to a small, cold stab of fear in his gut. He’d become so used to Luna’s peculiar way of accepting nearly everything with a small, sphinx-like smile on her face that he hadn’t really ever entertained the notion that she might be just as lost as he felt sometimes. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to depend on the solid rock of her natural optimism.

Stepping back from the door, he took a breath and told himself not to push her, that if she wanted to she’d tell him what was wrong in her own time. He would _not_ charge into a sensitive subject headfirst in typical Gryffindor fashion, he resolved, and felt briefly virtuous for being such a gentleman about it.

He opened his mouth to make a comment about the weather, but Luna, of course, had always had a habit of throwing wrenches into his best resolutions.

“I fought with my father,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, shedding what Dean had taken to be a shockingly green raincoat but which on closer inspection appeared to be a rather large feathered tarpaulin.

“Oh,” he said, thrown off-kilter, wanting to offer comfort but unsure how to start. Seamus sometimes got into spectacular rows with his mum, but Dean never really had to _say_ anything with Seamus, who had a penchant for spilling his sorrows with the help of a comforting bottle of Old Ogden’s finest. He could hardly offer _Luna_ a stiff drink, he thought wryly. He considered putting an arm around her, but that seemed all wrong. It was something he would have done with Ginny; with Luna it seemed to go too far and not far enough.

“He’ll have forgotten about it in the morning,” she told him in a tone that from any other woman Dean would have called bitterness. “He’s good at that. It’s what got him through the wars.”

“Should I–” he started uncertainly, but Luna interrupted him.

“You know,” she said, dropping the feathered thing on the floor and stepping out of matching boots, “I could really use a drink.”

Dean felt the beginnings of a smile tug at the corners of his own mouth. “I think I still have a few old bottles of apricot wine here somewhere,” he replied, turning to hunt in the cabinets that lined one wall. “Neville’s gran brought them over for the opening of the gallery and we never drank them.”

“It sounds horrid,” Luna observed. “Perfect.”

Dean found the wine in a box of old brushes shoved in the very back of a far cabinet. It smelled vaguely of turpentine and neither of them had a corkscrew, but when they finally wrestled a bottle open, any lingering doubts he had about the identity of the liquid inside were dispelled with the overpowering scent of fermented apricot.

“Cheers,” said Luna, taking a swig and pulling a face before passing him the bottle. He toasted her with the bottle before taking his own sip, careful to avoid the pieces of cork they’d knocked in.

The afternoon passed in a pleasant haze of fruit and talk, the steady patter of rain against the window soothing as they sat in the middle of the floor and drank wine together.

Luna, propped up on her elbow and tracing her fingertips around the neck of a bottle, was talking about a trip she’d started planning to hunt Wrackspurts in the Urals when Dean felt something in him shift, sensed something in his chest realign itself and drop neatly into place. Carefully, slowly, so as not to startle this strange newness, he opened his sketchbook and began to draw, studying the now-familiar form of the woman sitting across from him as she rhapsodized over the simple joys of hunting strange small creatures through snowstorms and bogs full of mosquitoes. 

He looked up once and met her eyes as he sketched, to find that she had stopped talking and was staring at him intently, her too-wide grey eyes piercing. She reached for the box of charcoal sitting near him.

“May I?”

Dean nodded, and she took the box, standing up and looking around appraisingly.

“Do you want some paper?” he asked, bringing his feet under him, meaning to stand up as well.

“No,” she said, giving him a mysterious look. “Don’t move.” 

He froze obediently, and with a final, decisive nod, she began to draw on his floor.

_Stop_ , he wanted to say, _that’s my floor, not a canvas_. But he was trapped, ensnared like one of her elusive Wrackspurts, and so he watched as she drew bold black lines on his wooden floor, her face lit by the particular pale light which filters through rain-drenched windows. He watched, entranced, as she worked, brow furrowed, the very tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

She stood back, finally, and surveyed her handiwork with satisfaction. He cautiously began to get up, and when she said nothing, he moved to stand beside her. 

Spread out before him on the floor was his own face, looking slightly quizzically off into the middle distance. He turned to Luna, a thousand questions bursting in his skull, clamoring to be asked. The question that slipped out past his careful barriers was not the one he’d planned.

“Stay with me?”

She smiled that secret smile at him and slipped her hand into his. “If you stay with me,” she said, and in her voice Dean heard promises of pyramids and mountaintops, jungles and headlong dives into creeks after strange things with skittering legs and a hundred shining eyes, quiet evenings by a fireside and long days unbroken by the boredom of routine.

He smiled back down at her and squeezed her hand. “Of course,” he said, his heart swelling with the unknown.

“Good,” she replied, and looked up with a calculating expression. “Tomorrow,” she said speculatively, “I’ll have to paint the ceiling.”


End file.
